Personal communication, productivity, and entertainment devices such as cellular phones, PDAs, portable email devices, tablet computers, e-books, hand-held games, portable media players, etc. (all referred to hereafter as “smart devices”) are known to include features such as graphical user interfaces on color touch screens, Bluetooth and/or WiFi capability, etc. Increasingly, such smart devices also incorporate support for ancillary applications (hereafter referred to as “apps”) for example calendars, email, maps and navigation, etc. Such ancillary applications may be pre-installed in a smart device or may be made available for download by a consumer.
Portable controlling devices capable of commanding the operation of multiple consumer appliances of different type and/or manufacture, such as universal remote controls, and the features and functions offered by such devices are also well known in the art. Sophisticated implementations of these devices incorporate technologies such as color touch screens, wireless home network compatibility, user configurable graphical user interfaces, slave relay stations positioned to control appliances not situated in line of sight of the controlling device, etc. In some cases such controlling device functionality may be offered in the form of an app for installation on a existing smart device, said app comprising a GUI to be used in conjunction with supplemental hardware and/or firmware, built-in or external to the smart device, suitable for the generation of appliance command signals. In other cases, such controlling devices may be self-contained units specific to that purpose such as for example Nevo® brand products from Universal Electronics Inc., or Harmony® brand products from Logitech Inc.
Regardless of the exact manner in which universal controlling device functionality is implemented, in general such devices or apps may require configuration or “set up” prior to use, i.e., an appropriate set of command data from within a library of command data sets must be associated with each of the specific appliances to be controlled, for example by entry of data that serves to identify each intended target appliance by its make, and/or model, and/or type; by testing various command formats sequentially, via command transmissions, until an appliance response is observed; by sampling signals of original equipment remote controls; etc.; all as known in the art. Since systems and methods for setting up universal controlling devices to command the operation of specific home appliances are well-known, these will not be described in greater detail herein. Nevertheless, for additional information pertaining to setup procedures, the reader may turn, for example, to U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,959,810, 5,872,562, 7,093,003, 7,653,212, or 7,612,685 all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
As will be described in detail hereafter, once such controlling device setup has been successfully performed, information regarding a consumer's appliance configuration gathered thereby may be advantageously used to provide additional services to the consumer, such as advice in the selection of additions or replacements to an existing equipment configuration, recommendations for preferred interconnections, etc.